iOS 17 isn’t an exciting update but does have one stand-out feature

If the instant feedback on Twitter is to be believed, Apple’s 2023 iPhone software update is going to be pretty underwhelming.

Actually, I watched software boss Craig Federighi outline the new features along with these keyboard warriors and I’m inclined to agree with them. Sure, there may be a few nifty quality-of-life updates such as NameDrop, but this and other new features – such as Check In – are surely useful only if you and the other person own iPhones.

Since the demise of business cards, the world has needed a digital equivalent. Namedrop does exactly this, sharing your contact details – and your new avatar background – with a stranger when you hover one iPhone over another.

That’s not going to work if the other person has an Android phone, though, and neither is Check In, which looks to be exclusive to iMessage and therefore useless if you need to send notifications of when you arrive (or fail to arrive) at an expected destination.

Cross-platform apps can already do a lot of what’s coming in iOS 17, if not quite as elegantly, and other updates such as being able to say “Siri” instead of “Hey Siri” and auto-collated photo albums of your pets fall under the category of features that you wrongly assumed were already in iOS but, in fact, weren’t.

There is, however, one quality-of-life update that I am looking forward to getting in September when Apple releases iOS 17 to the public. It’s called Live Voicemail and it displays a live transcript of the message the caller is leaving when you don’t answer the phone.

It’s helpful for those situations where the caller isn’t in your contacts and you don’t know whether to answer or not. The idea is that you can read the transcript and decide you do want to answer after all, in which case you can tap the Accept button and talk to the person before they hang up. And that saves you having to wait for that moment and call them back.

It also means you know what the message is more quickly than having to wait a bit and then dial into your voicemail, and lets you safely ignore calls when you’re busy because you can see on the call screen that it’s not important enough to stop whatever you’re doing.

A somewhat related new feature is the useful ability to leave a video message if someone doesn’t answer a FaceTime call.

The only other iOS 17 highlight is StandBy which shows the time and other information while your phone is being charged. It’s a little like the Apple Watch’s sideways nightstand mode, except with the ability to give you a lot more data.

There’s support for scrollable smart stack widgets and you can customise the clock display with various styles. At least one adopts a deep red hue so you can use it as a bedside clock.

In fact, the whole feature seems to be designed exclusively for nightstand use: it works only when your iPhone is charging and in landscape mode. It remains to be seen whether it will require a MagSafe charging stand – as shown in Apple’s images to demo StandBy – or if older iPhones without MagSafe will also get the feature.

You can find out more about iOS 17 on Apple’s website.

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